ct on
literature.

Sir Richard Blackmore contributed his share to the growing wave of
bourgeois morality, which in the 18th century was reflected in the
middle-class appeal of Addison and Steel, Lillo's _London Merchant_,
and Richardson's almost feminine plea for virtue rewarded. A
physician, Blackmore had turned to poetry for relaxation and composed
his soporific epics, by his own admission, in the coffee-houses and in
his coach while visiting patients. In the preface, to _Prince Arthur_
(1695) the City Bard took occasion to flay the Wits of the day for
their immorality, an attack which he followed up in 1697 with the
Preface to _King Arthur_, whose thinly disguised political allegory
won him a knighthood. Up to this point the Wits had treated him with
amused scorn, but when he called his big guns into action in the
_Satyr against Wit_ (dated 1700 but issued late in 1699) the Wits set
out to crush him for once and all. _Commendatory Verses on the Author
of the Two Arthurs and the Satyr against Wit_ (1700), the reply,
was far from commendatory. Edited by Tom Brown and sponsored by
Christopher Codrington, this miscellany attempted in scurrilous and
often bad verse to laugh the Knight out of literary existence. Its
main distinction lies in the list of contributors, among whom were Sir
Charles Sedley, Richard Steele, Tom Brown, and probably John
Dennis. Blackmore's supporters answered _Commendatory Verses_ with
_Discommendatory_ _Verses on Those Which are Truly Commendatory, on
the Author of the Two Arthurs, and the Satyr against Wit_. (1700).
It is not at all certain that Blackmore emerged second best in this
exchange of blows in the miscellanies. At any rate, unabashed he went
on to write more epics on Elizabeth, Alfred, Job, and to win himself a
doubtful immortality by being pilloried in Pope's _Dunciad_.

Throughout his writings Blackmore has a good deal to say about Wit,
and much about the abuse of it. While Swift in the _Tale of a Tub_
scolds the Wits for their addiction to nonsense and irreligion,
Blackmore goes still further in the _Satyr_, seeing Wit as something
which, in common practice, is evil and vicious, to be eradicated as
quickly as possible. It is the enemy of virtue and religion (in the
Preface to _Creation_, 1712, he links it with atheism), a form of
insanity, in opposition to 'Right Reason', and the seducer of young
men. Combatting its iniquities, Blackmore proposes to set up a Bank
and Mint of Wit